White Balance in Photography

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White Balance - What is it and why does it matter?

Your eyes are remarkably adaptable. They can adjust to a wide variety of lighting conditions. Anyone who has operated a camera which requires manual setting of shutter speed and aperture will be familiar with thinking about the amount of light available, so even though you can see clearly in situations from dim indoor lighting to bright mid-day sunshine, your camera needs to adjust for the amount of light to avoid overexposing or underexposing your film or digital sensor.

But the amount of light is not the only consideration; what about the colour of that light? Again, the eyes (and the brain) can be quite adaptable, so that a scene light by greenish-tinged fluorescent lighting might look the same as one lit by orange-tinged incandescent lighting, but what you think you see might not be what your camera sees.

Light that isn't pure white is going to affect the colours that your camera registers when you take a photo. Sometimes, this is desirable. Last month, we showed a couple of photos from early in the morning and late in the evening in Arizona, when we were specifically trying to get the landscape photos lit by the "golden" light when the sun is low on the horizon. However, when you want to accurately depict the colour of the scene as if it were viewed in white light, you may need to think about white balance.

In film, adjusting for the colour of lighting conditions is done using films made for specific light, and by using colour correcting filters. Most digital cameras, however, have at least some ability to correct for specific lighting conditions; if you have a digital camera that has this feature, then it may be worth your time to check it out.

Many digital cameras have several common settings. Usually the default is auto white balance, in which the camera will try to estimate the light colour based upon the average colour in the exposure. Often, this is close enough, particularly in daylight conditions. However, for conditions strongly lit by one type of light source, you might try to match the source to your setting. Many cameras have settings for fluorescent lighting, tungsten lighting, and potentially daylight settings for sunny and for cloudy days. Another good option is custom white balance, in which you photograph a white or gray object in the light you're going to photograph in, and use this photo to tell your camera how to set the white balance (exactly how you do this depends on he specific camera).

White balance is one reason that we shoot raw files when we use our digital cameras. Since the raw files are the raw digital sensor output, and not processed to adjust for white balance, we can adjust after the fact when we download the photos to our computer. That way, if we aren't satisfied with auto white balance or a preset, we can adjust using a custom white balance.

For difficult lighting situations, we'll try to shoot a medium grey card or an object close to grey or white in order to have a reference to adjust white balance. We have a tabletop studio at home to take photos of small objects - to light it we use standard incandescent lights. This gives a very orange photo if not adjusted, but simply shooting a grey card and using this to set a custom white balance lets us correct the colour. This lets us use $12 desk lamps (thank you, Ikea) to light our photo studio.

If your camera is set to take jpeg or tiff files, the white balance processing occurs at the time you take the photo, so make sure that you pay attention to your white balance settings.

Patty Hankins & Bill Lawrence are the co-owners of Hankins-Lawrence images, LLC, a digital photography company based in Maryland.

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